One easy but very good-looking change would be a small muzzle flash every time a ship fires a weapon, similar to the small explosions when an unshielded ship gets hit. Ideally it would be different based on the specific weapon, or at least weapon type, firing. Another cool visual addition would be longer, "jet-plane" style engine exhaust trails for certain ships like fighters.

I agree with EvilTom84 completely that multiple, possibly race-unique FTL techs would be extremely cool, as in Sword of the Stars, things like warp gates, one-way "catapults," or fleet-based FTL.

Wish could turn AI handling of ground-force management on/off on a per-world basis.

It's too much micro to handle all manually - but turning it on clobbers worlds where I'm trying to generate enough troops for my fleets - so becomes a micro-hell vs. macro-fight-with-automation samsara. :(

For the Ship Design window: 1) Add a check-box to filter out components that cannot be placed on the current design. E.g. If I add hyper-drive to a base design the game tells me that this is not permitted. It would be great in this instance if the hyper-drive components were filtered out of the list to start with. I advised making this a check-box option because perhaps there is somebody out there with reasons I have not discovered for looking at incompatible components.

2) Highlight obsolete components. It would help when upgrading designs if components that have been superseded were highlighted so I can easily scan the list to see which components might need my attention.

For the Selection Panel. 3) Whenever I select anything with a cargo hold, please display how full this cargo hold is. This is particularly useful for mining bases so I can see if they are filling up.

For the Expansion Planner screen: 4) Please make this screen load with the filter and sort settings previously used. Yes - mentioned by others, but I feel this would be very helpful. In fact, it would be a good general rule to make all screens remember their previous settings.

Important 4 me: A tech that allows to have more than 3 Planetary Facilities "Regional Capital"! More than 50 ship families image folders - I mean not more than 50 races only the number of shipimage folders! Possibility to say own empire do not attack civilian things! Independent races should be different to empire races at start of a game especially in prewarp era. Possibilty to disable the question of canceling the protection treaty with pirates. Please make it at least possible to set the willingnes to break treaty in empire policy to set to 0, like forbidden.

Attack suggestions should only be made for fleets with no mission. - Can't say if it is so now

Nice2Have: Start as pirate and become an empire after Criminal Network built. Possibilty to disable the question of canceling the mining rights/luxury export. Possibilty to disable the question of do trade sanctions.

Really nice to have were: If you can discuss over government with other empires, but not to easy. Over subjugated empires you should have more control. Let's change there government by max 1-2 steps If you could make war with a late tech with only different kampfbots and that you can control ships without hab moduls and lifesupport, like drones. If you have with two empires defense pacts and one wants to declare war the other one, you should solve the problem with diplomacy. Or at least you shouldn't get a negative reputation. New spacebase type "Luxury Extractor Station". Fuel Ships. It should be worst for an empire, if it attacks/destroys passenger ships, colony ships and resort bases. They have to get a rebellion if they attack an passenger ship filled with their own race!!!

My first post! Such a beautiful and well thought out game. This game is on my top two best games list (First is Diplomacy). Thanks to the dev(s) for creating it. I'm on my 4th full game and thoroughly enjoying it.

Immediate Wish:

'Load Troops' button in the "Ships and Bases" window: When you have a large fleet of just troop ships, they usually bottleneck at a colony. So I disband them and send them out manually to quickly load troop in the vicinity then fleet them back up again.

For the future DWII:

Client/Server architecture for the game. That way players could optionally setup a game server with much larger galaxies and features and open up the possibility for multiplayer.

I agree with the above post. A better way to load troops would be great. Troop fleets can be extremely slow to load.

I would also like to see a ship or fleet follow option so I can have Fleets follow other fleets or maybe have construction ships follow behind a fleet at a certain distance to help with repair issues after a battle.

Being able to right click the fleet from the left toolbar and select options from there would be a really nice addition as well

-------------Weap--Ener----HT---total Station A :---30K---0K-----30K---=60K Station B :---30K---30K---90K---=120K Station C :---30K---0K-----0K----=30K Station D :---30K---30K---0K----=60K Total :-------120K---60K---120K--=300K -25% :------90K----45K---90K----225K (my max allowed, not the addition of 3 numbers before) (red if I have more than 225K, green if I have less) racial :-----+10%---+0%---+5% Scientist :---+5%--+10%--+10% Planet :-----+20%---+0%---+0% Last total :-125K----50K----104K

The sentences are not easy to read and see how many bonus in weapon I have. I think it is more easy like this to understand how I can optimize my science (red = no more, green = more).

For the Ship Design window: 1) Add a push-button for have an automatic design, and we can modify after this design. 2) If the computer say "you must add a weapon", I could click on this, and a weapon is selected. If I click again, the next weapon is selected. 3) More advices. For some coumpound, the game say "no more than 1", but for some other, 2 is useless but we dont have any advice ...

Spy : 4) When I try to stole techno, I would like choose the speed (fast, medium, slow), and ask my spy to send me every months the informations for a techno, and he can come back only when he finish. And maybe I can ask him to come back only when there no techno to stole ... :) 5) A really easy task for have the skills of my spy. For example, stole the particulars of one systems from another race.

My biggest beef with the game is with the ship design UI. We *really* need to be able to rearrange the order in which components are built by dragging it up and down the middle list (in the ship design menu). Also, we need a way to revert the sorting for the middle list back to default. Also, being able to designate the order in which components are built in the design templates would be amazing (in reference to the files contained in the designTemplates folder)!

In addition, improvements to the exploration ship AI would be well received. It's so much more effective to manually control them (and so very tedious when you have 50 of the things). The exploration ships take entirely too long to map a system. I'm very sure it's much easier said than done to improve AI. That being said, if exploration ships would just investigate ruins,abandonded ships and stations, and travel close enough to unidentified planets to reveal resources based on your current resource profile sensor range that would be wonderful.

Made an account so I could make one small suggestion; not sure if anyone else posted this idea...

As far as I know, the different shield components (Corvidian, Talassos, Deucalios, etc..) all use the same shieldstrike.png - without any capability to designate a different image via components.txt. I thought it'd be cool for flavor and easy identification if they were colored like their individual components looked: red for Corvidian, fuchsia for Talassos, cobalt for Deucalios, etc.. Or ideally enable us to designate shieldstrike.png's the way we can with weapon sprites!

Then graphical-minded modders can not only make different-colored shieldstrike sprites, but also use unique geometry and design for things like hexagonal defense-matrices or organic-looking barriers. Small change, potentially lots of flavor!

Almost all the other components are visually distinct - I always wondered why shields weren't. I guess one problem would be if someone stacked two kinds of shields on one design... but developers, please!

I'd really welcome to be able to choose targets of space ports and defense bases during battle as their own priotity has proven more then once pretty poor (e.g. they fire at far away capital ships, causing naturally almost no effect while troop transports, that could have been easily destroyed, are permitted to unload invading troops upon the attacked planet). I think, as I build and pay for those stations, I should have the option to tell them what to shoot at if I'm not happy with their choice.

Some things which have bugged me about DW that I would like to see changed:

- The lack of ability to reset component lists to thier default order without restarting the game. (This also applies to every other sortable list.) - Fighter controls being missing from mining stations. (They are the only stations which don't have them and I have no idea why.) - Can't specify 'allow current race only' for migration, so the empire race swarms in and takes over leaving the native no room to grow. You can always keep 'foreign' races away, but the empire race doesn't seem to have any restrictions at all. - Area weapons are not that great since the wave vanishes once it's target is destroyed rendering them almost entirely useless. It would be super if the area waves could be made persistent rather than dependant on the existence of a single object. - Area weapons were far more fun in Legends when they came directly from the firing ship. (Seriously, berserker ships were hillarious even with the above limitation.) - Remove the (un)deploy timers from resupply ships and allow them to be deployed anywhere (even deep space), they don't achieve anything except to irritate you and encourage you to use kitbashed fuel ships to get around the limitations.

<edit> - Improved Scout ships. I would like to see an ability for scouts to automatically re-visit previously explored systems to update maps and check for pirate/enemy activity, either by specific ctrl-click command or default behaviour once all other locations have been explored.

- Some means of filtering the expansion planner by system would be extremely welcome.

Some things probably only I am interested in:

- Can't change ship images wholesale from the design editor, entities must be changed one at a time and fighters can never be changed without editing files outside the game. It would be awesome if there was a dropbox in the design screen which when opened gives you a preview of one ship type from all available families and upon selection changes the images of all ships, bases and fighters to that family. Entirely cosmetic, no component changes whatsoever.

- Terraforming facilities being largely pointless. I'd like to swap the TF ability with the Ikurro racial ability, so the facilities can give you a gradual improvement of a planet (if you can afford to run them) and the Ikurro still have an environmental ability. No idea how to even start looking at this though.

- Pirates. As cool as things have become I kinda miss the Pirates from Legends who just collected a random assortment of ships from all over the place and tooled around near thier single starbase until you cleared them out, and maybe they defected once you beat them (or some nearby gang). Perhaps a few 'minor' pirate groups could find thier way back into the next update? Yeah... I do miss the defection events and sorting through the newly aquired ships to see if there's anything fun. You just don't see them anymore though.

Things which have really annoyed me:

- Spies. Espionage. Intelligence. It is so very overpowered and really needs toning down, specifically the sabotage/destroy ability. It really takes the fun out of the game when almost your entire empire goes up in flames one station at a time and there is exactly nothing you can do about it. I've have several starts where I've developed my home system, met a pirate gang, fought them off, and then been reduced to whatever ships I have flying because everything I built, and everything I build gets sabotaged. It wouldn't be nearly so aggravating if you could do something about it, but there's nothing. (Besides opening the editor and killing every pirate spy in the galaxy, which is kinda cheating.) So yeah, some means of defending yourself against godlike spies that doesn't involve either cheating or delving deep into the tech tree would be nice. (Moving the Intel Agency to a less buried position and giving it a positive modifier for counter intel might work ???) Or a checkbox on game creation to limit or disable spying.

- Dread Pirates. Okay, I get that they are supposed to be kind of a big deal. But what I don't get is why they seem to have a respawn delay of zero. You go through the non-trivial effort of having them carve a path through your buildings, then hunting them down and whittling away at thier substantial fleet, chipping away at thier fortress and finally getting rid of them. Then before your ships even make it home from killing them you get a notification that they're back and it all starts again. I'd expect decades if not longer before seeing them again. But no, and it's the reason I don't play with respawing pirates anymore as it's just too much like work. It would be nice if the Dread Pirates got thier own respawn checkbox, so you could have them stay dead when killed while still having normal pirates respawing.

- Boarding pods are flaky things. I'm pretty sure this is a bug and so doesn't really belong in a wishlist, but the vanishing pods have annoyed me so much because I run into it quite a lot given my inclination towards putting shiny spaceships into more responsible hands; mine.

- Nebula Navigation. Why can I not tell a ship in a nebula cloud to move to a specific location in said cloud? It is aggravting and incredibly tedious setting up each ship on jump heading at 1/4 speed and trying to cancel the order when it gets near a useful position.

Minimize ability. It is SOOOOOO aggravating to have to save and exit the game to try and deal with email or other activities on the system. Can't believe the programmers missed this simple yet important feature when designing this game.

A "Stockpile resource x here" command, so you can create remote refuelling/construction bases.

Would work best as a tab in the detail view with a list of checkboxes separated into fuel, construction materials, luxuries, etc. Or failing that, a single ctrl menu entry to stockpile Hydrogen and Caslon would give the most functionality for the least effort.

0. My top wishlist - fix or expand retrofit logic so that we dont have current meta of advisor prompt 100% auto mass wave retrofit, or promot off 100% manual retrofit hell. Does not scale well at large empire maps/size. Current Automatic v Manual flags under retrofit column do not work or meaningless for state ships. With advisor prompt off, private sector ships/bases set to manual design but auto retrofit work beautifully.

But state ship/bases with advisor promot off and designs set to auto or manual, and retrofit to auto - will not automatically retrofit as per exact same setup for private sector. This is either broke, not working as intended, or not currently supported as intended option. This would be my top wishlist by a mile for a fix / expansion to existing AI. Please,

0.5. My new #2 wishlist item instead of resupply batch below - auto sync button in design screen for mandatory or usual parameter defined items in ship design - players can add more if desired, but when design cant be saved without minimum component A, no point forcing us to constantly tweak manually. E.g. Hab and life support - if sync option enabled, then everytime i add or subtract other modules that increase/decrease hab and life support req, the design screen automatically adds or subtracts hab and life when auto sync pressed. For boarding protection, players may want to manually add more hab modules, but for love of god, just auto sync to minimum since we cant even save the design without that. Same for all other required to design components - resource scanner on explorer, etc

For parameter defined items, if auto sync button pressed, auyo sync to fulfill minimum of measured output after the player has added manually at least one component of that type: E.g. If player adds fusion reactor, then auto sync number of them to at least be minimum to meet excess power required for weapons, cruise, amd shield recharge. Player can always add or subtract and not use auto sync button if for some reason desire to have lot less or more energy, but the 90%+ use case is we all usually design to standard energy spec. Make auto sync button do this lot easier than us doing same step over and over manually Same for energy collector added and min static usage, mandatory command center on all designs, construction yard on spaceport, etc, players can always add more, but auto sync should just add one or whatever minimum number needed to save design anyways

1. Class defined automation role for resupply ships - they currently have none and only class that does not have an automation role (escort, patrol, protect planet, etc). Preferably an automation role they will go find and deploy somewhere to be an actual resupply ship than current paperweight in whatver system built until manually ordered to deploy

2. Re-deploy at last location button for resupply ships. Huge hassle to retrofit, then redeploy manually again

3. Hotkey dedicated for resupply ships. Current lumping into Y key with constructors is too large a pool and not helpful

4. Ctrl, Shift, and other numeric selection to allow for more than 10 current fleet quick pick hotkeys. Ctrl and Shift would at least give us 30 fleet hotkeys.

5. Multi-select or entire folder imports of previously saved ship designs. Loading one design at a time is painful.

6. WASD option for moving map along with or replacement option to arrow keys. Right handed players generally use mouse at right and left hand to control movement. Standard arrow keys on normal keyboard placement is awkard for simultaneous kb + mouse.

7. Hotkey remapping support. For the love of god, join the modern era. Awesome game, but non-remappable hotkeys are old, old school.

8. idle at last location or idle at nearest home system checkbox - current meta is when ship goes idle with no further automation missions it can do (e.g. Auto constructors, explorers) they go idle at last location. Give option for player setting to control whether idle ship comes home to nearest system before going idle, or just idle in middle of nowhere

10. Allow cancel retrofit order - even if means losing assigned resources for last retrofit in process, is hassle to wait for stalled lesser gen refit when a new gen design has just been unlocked. Sometimes refits that got stalled that are now going again are multipke generations behind. Better version or option - allow queuing new retrofit order if new design available - currently have to wait till done before new retrofit order accepted

5. Multi-select or entire folder imports of previously saved ship designs. Loading one design at a time is painful.

The designs UI is not super clear, but you can highlight multiple ships/stations and save them all under a single file name instead of one ship at a time. tl;dr - it only saves the selected designs, but it doesn't tell you you can select more than one at a time. Shift click to select all from last click, Ctrl click to pick specifics. Same as windows default.

It would be great if the Resource Planner had a "System" column in the bottom grid. It would make finding all the resources in a particular system much easier. Right now, after exploring a system, it is quite difficult to see where all the resources are located. By having the System column, you could sort by that column and quickly see all the resources in a particular system.

Alternately, if the planets, moons and asteroids names were always prefixed with the System Name, that would accomplish the same thing. Most of the times planets are named after the system but not always. And moons and asteroids never are.

Ugh. Dread Pirates need an option to turn them off entirely. Or at least scale them sensibly with the player. Facing a half-dozen capital ships with a 30+ escort of whatever else when I don't even have ships big enough to be called cruisers and nothing beyond vel. shards to put on them is essentially game over.

Also worth noting that I will never play as Haakonish again. Thier "special ability" of forcing you to murder your carefully coralled foreign population is utterly and insanely terrible.

They are intelligent and quite aggressive. Haakonish are highly pretentious. They also have a strong sense of their own racial superiority. Thus they do not enjoy the company of other races and have a tendency to be xenophobic.

Also, by the time legendary pirates appear you should be able to handle them. They have a base nearby, and a good sized fleet should take them out. Or you can just use the editor.

1.) I want the same abilities in the Planetary Build Queue that Space Empires had. a.) Make the "in construction" item part of the sortable list. I really really want to sort my Construction Ship Retrofit before the 10% Colony Ship b.) Make it possible to upgrade ordered items to new Designs, so I don't have to abort/restart them or retrofit them right after production.

2.) I would love the option to send fleet or ships on patrol routes. ( Check System A, Check System B, Refuel at System C, Check System D, Repeat )

3.) An Exact explanation in the Galactopedia what every Shiptype does when automated and left alone. This would prevent a lot of WTF?!?- moments.

4.) I know this one is to big for DW:U and the only one I know of which has been asked before. But since I heard talk about DW2 this should be a feature :D An Empire wide Build-Queue for Construction. This turns the calling object from construction around, but I think the a solution similiar to DF or RimWorld would be really great. In addition to that I would like a menu to access this List to a.) change the order / Priorities ( needed resources before defense, before resorts, before science ) b.) the calling distance for build ships ( only two sector radius, not the ones building infrastructure for the colonies five sectors away ) c.) the automation settings for queue items and automated build ships ( only automated take from queue, do not build mines on planets with one resource below 50%, hog all fuel planets ... ) No discussion about runtime, those are one-time boolean if statements after setting/discovery :) d.) The ability to choose/preset which Design is used by the hot-buttons and a Drop-Down Menu in the Expansion Manager ( which is a really great tool ) Redesigning the standard design last, everytime I use more than one design for a Type ( Cheap Gas Mine, Defended Gas Mine, Refueling Outpost )

e.) please sort the build menu by name or at least design type, not by date of creation ( This one could still be a DW:U feature )

5.) Another one from space Empires .. Defining and saving queries in Menues like the Planets/Colonies list. Especially the Expansion Planner and the Ship/Fleet Screens

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ooh and

6.) More Character Pictures for Races or at least the ability to mod them in.

Yes I know you can do it. But only for predefined Characters, which I find kind of stupid. And I guess that one was wished for before. What I want is the in-game/ in-code framework ( crap it's a DW2 feature again .. ) The ability for the game to randomize from a couple of given pictures for the different character roles. ( Human_Admiral_1.png, Human_Admiral_2.png, Human_Admiral_3.png .. Haakonisn_Scientest_3.png )

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Since nobody posted after me yet.

7.) If you use Windows look - Windows usability. This was the fifth time today alone I tried to move the design screen or the expansion planner around to look at the star map behind it. THIS WOULD BE AWESOME !

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I am on a roll ..

8.) A little note when one of my ships get destroyed. Attack alone is not interesting enough, since most of the time the ship is able to flee. But when a ship actually gets destroyed its where things get interesting. Have I lost ships during this attack, did we escape or not, do I have to order more ships or not ?

My guess would be that posting ideas here would be at least as useful today as it has been for the last couple of years. There is a chance that what is here is pretty much ignored, and also a chance that a good idea could influence DW2.

And to the Emperor: Very little is known about DW2 apart from it having been stated that is being worked on.